121 - Grass Roots Science

Program Notes §

Guest speakers: Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna

Rupert Sheldrake: “Especially in Brittan, this declining confidence in science, and this declining funding of science has let to a reduction of scientific morale. Fewer and fewer people want to study science in schools or go into it as graduate students… . It looks as if the great golden days, the golden age of the sixties and seventies of endless expansion, is over, perhaps forever.”

Rupert Sheldrake: “So morphic resonance research has turned out to be cheap, indeed, almost free in some cases. And much of the leading research has been done by students as projects. And this has made it clear to me that students, who do tens of thousands of projects around the world are quite capable of doing leading-edge research. They are actually doing it in the realm of morphic resonance.”

Terence McKenna: “I think that science has not only moved from the easy problems to the hard problems, in its evolution over the past thousand years, it’s also moved from the cheap problems to the expensive problems.”

Terence McKenna: “Science is not done in the spirit of Greek curiosity about the order of nature. Science is done to make money on a vast scale.”

Terence McKenna: “I think science has been vastly transformed from the simple impulse to understand the natural world around us into a kind of hellish marriage with capitalism, technology, enormous instruments, and the military/industrial complex.”

Terence McKenna: “And I believe, I absolutely agree with you, there should be no such thing as classified scientific data. That’s an obscene concept.”

Rupert Sheldrake: “The vast majority of psychedelic research, 99.999% at least, which has a lot to say, as I suppose you would agree, about the nature of consciousness, the range of imagination, and the powers of the human mind, etc. is not funded at all by official agencies. In fact, every effort is made to suppress it.”

Grass Roots Science Report mentioned in this podcast:
An Amateur Qualitative Study of 48 2C-T-7 Subjective Bioassays

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120 - Notes to Myself

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122 - Saving the World

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Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:20 ► §

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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Well, how are you doing today?

00:00:28 ► §

I don’t know why, but for some strange reason I seem to get the blase before the holidays rather than after them.

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So I guess you could say that my energy level is a bit low today, but there really isn’t any good reason for that being the case, and so I’ve decided

00:00:46 ► §

to put out another podcast just to cheer myself up by joining you in the salon for a little

00:00:51 ► §

visit.

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I’ve had several programs lined up, well, almost lined up, that I think you’re really

00:00:59 ► §

going to enjoy, but not one of them has finally come together just yet from permissions, standpoints, and things like that.

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And so I’m afraid that I’ve also been overloading you on Terrence McKenna lectures lately,

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so I decided to compromise and play another one of the trialogue tapes.

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I think it was last October that I last played one of these three-way conversations between the biologist Rupert

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Sheldrake, the mathematician Ralph Abraham, and, well, what shall I call him?

00:01:32 ► §

The Bard McKenna, I guess.

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The tape I’m going to play right now is a little different from some of the others I’ve

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been playing.

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First of all, the sound quality isn’t all that great, and I’ve had several people take a

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look at it, but the bottom line is that this particular flaw isn’t an easy one to fix, and

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for what it’s worth, you know, I’ve got to put up with the bad sound too, and if I let it, it’ll drive

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me nuts. So I’ve actually had to think of parts of this recording as having had sound effects added on purpose by some demented DJ,

00:02:09 ► §

and then it seems okay, you know. At least it doesn’t bother me as much.

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Actually, I gave serious thought to not even playing this particular recording,

00:02:19 ► §

because it doesn’t have all of the sizzle that we normally expect when Terrence McKenna is involved.

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It doesn’t have all of the sizzle that we normally expect when Terence McKenna is involved.

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But even if there’s only one person who really groks the message that Rupert is trying to get across,

00:02:34 ► §

it’ll be worth all of our time, I think.

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Even if becoming a grassroots scientist isn’t something you find particularly fascinating,

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well, just think about some young Ralph Rupert or Terrence out there who hears this and says yes, I’m going to really look into this or that question

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that science has so far left unanswered and I’m going to figure it out

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for myself. Who knows what might come from just one

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mind, young or old, taking a look at our world from

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a slightly different direction.

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And even if you don’t discover something big and important,

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just adding to our knowledge of this fascinating universe seems worth the effort to me.

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And so I’ve decided to play this along with the rest of the trialogue recordings that Ralph gave me,

00:03:21 ► §

and we’ll just have to wait and see what comes from them in the months ahead.

00:03:26 ► §

When I first listened to this tape that I’m about to play, my initial thought was that I should probably cut the first three-and-a-half minutes out because, well, what they were doing was more or less trying to just figure out how to begin.

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But then it dawned on me that maybe this was a recording of a private

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trilogue, one without an audience. And if so, I reasoned, well, this would be sort of like the

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basement tapes that Dylan and the band recorded that summer in Woodstock. And so I’ve left the

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tape intact, and I’ll let you decide for yourself if you want to fast forward to where their trialogue actually begins.

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But maybe you’ll enjoy hearing these three great minds getting wound up for what sounds like a private trialogue.

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Just the three or maybe four of them.

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So if you’ve ever wondered what these three amigos talked about when they were alone, well, this may be just what you’ve been waiting for.

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And as you will hear, this Trilog was recorded on September 2nd, 1991, and apparently there

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was one person there other than the three of them, and that was the woman whose voice

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we hear in the beginning.

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And I’m not sure there’s anything new here, to be honest, but I’m going to play this whole series anyway,

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just in case there was something here in what is either a rehearsal or a recording session

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that was possibly intended to be produced as a commercial venture.

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All I know about the tapes are that they were in a batch of cassettes

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that Ralph Abraham loaned to Bruce Dahmer and me to digitize in order to pass along here in the salon.

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So let’s listen to this old recording of a possibly private conversation

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between Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terrence McKenna.

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It doesn’t have to go to six, right?

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No, no, no.

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No.

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I think that we’re happy with an hour, an hour and a half or two hours.

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We can stop any…

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So any time after an hour?

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What happened a little bit in the past is that I, being the most impatient one,

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frequently try to stop it when it’s not quite done.

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Yeah, I think it’s good to have a time we shoot for, like quarter to six.

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Yes.

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You know, because we found that we sort of faltered and we would have stopped,

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and then we went on and it was really good.

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And it was better, yeah.

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So this is called volume 2, number 1.

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Yes.

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This one’s on grassroots science, so… Can I hear it? Yes. This one’s on grassroots science. Can I hear it?

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Yes.

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Oh. I can hear a kind of echo.

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Hmm?

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I can hear a kind of echo. Maybe… Well, let’s see. I don’t know where you’d hear that from.

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Maybe from the headphones.

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Ignore it.

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It’s sometimes hard to.

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Well, I can

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mediate it some

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so maybe we should have a mantra to do with

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knowledge like whom Thank you. Amen. Thank you. So, so

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September the 2nd

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volume 2

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number 1

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1991

00:08:56 ► §

grassroots science science.

00:09:16 ► §

The organization of science as we know it has become increasingly professional and institutional and big science is increasing in its scope and power so

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that more of physics research gets directed into huge projects

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like the super accelerator.

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A lot of physicists are very worried

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because this is drawing off billions of dollars in funding.

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In biology, the conception of the human genome project

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was brought about by a scientific politician

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who thought, well, if physics can have big science

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and military can, like Star Wars,

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why can’t biology?

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So this was a deliberate attempt to model biological research

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on these huge projects involving billions in funding.

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And this project is going ahead.

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It’s meant that there’s even greater predominance of funding in the billions

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for molecular biology, gene sequencing, gene cloning, biotechnology,

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that kind of research.

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And inevitably this attracts funds, prestige and manpower

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away from the more traditional low expense, low prestige branches of biology.

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And this tendency towards big science and bigger centres and the predominance

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of fewer centres of excellence is going on all the time. The editor of Nature told me

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last year when I met him that there was a tendency for papers now coming from smaller

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there was a tendency for papers now coming from smaller institutions to be rejected because the peer review process meant that people would say,

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well, why didn’t you do a mass spectrograph on that compound?

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Why didn’t you do this or that?

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Requiring, as part of the routine production of papers,

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the use of expensive equipment to which few have access.

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And he said that although the papers may have been of equal merit, the standards were changing

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in favor of large institutions and large laboratories.

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And so I said, well, what happens if you raise this question with the people who insist on

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these standards?

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Isn’t it unfair on people in smaller institutions with lower access to big funds?

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And he said, not really.

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He said, if they’re any good, they’ll move to a big institution.

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funds and he said not really he said if they’re any good they’ll move to a big institution so there was this tendency for not only increasing specialization but increasing

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predominance of a smaller number of institutions and access to big money

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is coming to dominate the whole structure of science as we know it. And this is merely a carrying further of the process of professionalisation

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and institutionalisation that’s overtaken mainstream science,

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essentially in the present century.

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In the 19th century and in the 18th, and indeed until the present century,

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the situation was very different.

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Indeed, until the present century, the situation was very different.

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In Darwin’s case, for example, he himself never held an academic post in any institution.

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And when one reads books like The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, the research base on which he was drawing was that of practical plant breeders,

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he was drawing was that of practical plant breeders, animal husbandry people, hands-on animal breeders, animal trainers, amateur pigeon fanciers, colonial administrators who’d

00:12:35 ► §

observed what native people did, shipwreck mariners who had stories about feral animals

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on remote islands and so on.

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In other words, there was a vast wealth of knowledge that fed into Darwin’s kind of science,

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hardly any of which came out of government-funded scientific institutions.

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Most of it was low-cost, grassroots type of research.

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That doesn’t mean to say that the people didn’t know what they were talking about.

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These were true experts in the sense that they’d spent many years doing what they did

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and spoke from a wealth of experience.

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But we see a completely different picture there.

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And what’s happened is that the amateur and the non-professional base of science

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has become increasingly marginal marginalized from the point of

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view of institutional science you can’t do research till you’ve got a phd you can’t do it

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unless you’re in a big institution you can’t do it unless you’ve got a grant you can’t publish it

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unless you can write and do the kind of thing that passes peer review committees and so forth

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well the tendency has gone further and further in this direction. So the question is, do things have to be as they are now?

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Or is there a new model possible?

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Well, I think a new model of science is not only possible but desirable

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and not only desirable but necessary.

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Because on the one hand, there’s a collapse of confidence in big science.

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There’s a decline in public support for massive scientific projects

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genetic engineering is getting a very bad press

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embryo research and biotechnology excite more public fear than admiration

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and the same is true of nuclear research

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particle physics research

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star wars research

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and many other aspects of big

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science. One of the results of this is that the public esteem for science is declining.

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People blame the environmental crisis, nuclear pollution, ecological depletion, agribusiness,

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factory farming, chemicals in food, pesticide residues, toxic wastes,

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all these things are blamed fairly or unfairly on the scientific establishment.

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And so the constituency that supports science declines as a political voice,

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which means that governments seeking to make cuts, as they always do, as they have been for years in Britain now,

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find it’s quite easy to cut science budgets,

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and it won’t cause much loss of votes.

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In fact, it may even cause a slight gain in votes.

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They’ve just axed Britain’s main nuclear physics facility,

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the Daresbury Laboratory near Manchester,

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in which Britain led the world.

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The whole facility has just been axed.

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And there was, apart from scientists themselves who worked there

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and other people in the scientific community,

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scarcely any ruffle of protest.

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They saved £2 million a year.

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So this, especially in Britain,

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this declining confidence in science and declining funding of science has led to a reduction in scientific morale.

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Fewer and fewer people want to study science in schools or go into it as graduate students.

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And there’s a declining interest in large-scale professional institutional science.

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So the thing is entering a kind of crisis.

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Many scientists are very demoralized,

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and it looks as if the great golden days,

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the golden age of the 60s and 70s of endless expansion is over, perhaps forever.

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Well, in this context, a possible new approach to science becomes more feasible

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because it may be necessary simply for economic and political reasons.

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But I think it’s desirable even if it weren’t for the fact that large-scale science is entering a state of crisis.

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And the reason I’ve been thinking about this

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is because of my own experience with morphic resonance research.

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Since this is such an unorthodox theory,

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the theory of memory in nature,

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since it goes against the established paradigm or model of science,

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funding has been very hard to come by.

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And what’s in fact become apparent

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is that holistic

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research of the kind that this involves is much cheaper than reductionist research. If

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you study whole systems, you usually need relatively small funds, but the smaller the

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thing you study, the bigger the apparatus and the more the funding. So when you get

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down to the most evanescent of nuclear particles, you need the largest of apparatus, miles across, costing many billions of dollars.

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So morphic resonance research has turned out to be cheap,

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indeed almost free in some cases,

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and much of the leading research has been done by students as projects.

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And this has made it clear to me that students who do every year

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tens of thousands of projects

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around the world are quite capable of doing leading-edge research.

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They are actually doing it in the realm of morphic resonance.

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But in no other sphere of mainstream science could one imagine students routinely

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or be playing a major role in the growth of knowledge in this way.

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It’s also made it clear to me that a lot of really interesting and important research projects

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can be done on very small budgets by students or even by amateurs

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outside the framework of institutional science.

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And the book I’m working on at the moment which has made me think about these things

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proposes eight experiments that any one of which could break our current paradigms but which would

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be very cheap to do and some could be done by almost anyone for example investigation of the

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sense of being stared at that we talked about previously and which is the discussion in our

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in our book of trial marks so i think the conditions are right for a new awakening a new

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renaissance of research a kind of more democratic kind of science where more people are empowered

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to take part and when you think about it, the kind of base that Darwin drew on

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exists today, and even more so.

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There are tens of thousands of amateur plant breeders,

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there are amateur orchid growers,

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and people who lavish care and attention

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and their own funding in breeding new kinds of orchids.

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There are rose societies, there are bamboo societies,

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organised in societies where people swap specimens,

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have a great deal of experience and knowledge

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of their various species of plants.

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And again, with animals, there are probably more pigeon fanciers,

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dog breeders, rabbit fanciers and so on than ever before.

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The numbers run into the millions of people

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with a great deal of experience of breeding and raising these animals.

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There are people who train horses, dogs.

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There are falconers who train falcons,

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including new species recently domesticated,

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building up a great wealth of knowledge,

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which is all available through amateur networks and societies.

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There are anglers and hunters who get to know the species they hunt very well.

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There are old-style naturalists still around.

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There are amateurs tracking ecological change

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as a result of climatic and other factors

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who can build up invaluable records.

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There are hundreds of thousands of millions of home computers

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giving statistical analysis power.

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Previously, the preservers, big institutions with big mainframe computers,

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making this kind of sophisticated mathematical analysis

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available to almost anyone.

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There are hundreds of thousands of science graduates

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with a training in the professional background, not working as professional researchers, who could contribute to this. And there are

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already areas where almost all the research that goes on is in fact amateur. These are

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some. In addition, there’s the whole realm of psychedelic experience, where professional

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research is very limited in scope

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but amateur research has accumulated a wealth of knowledge and experience

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there are amateur computer experts

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who have developed an enormous amount of experience

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and I think that this base that already exists, the present almost completely

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disregarded by institutional science, provides the basis already in place, costing governments

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nothing, requiring no external funding, from which a new kind of grassroots science could

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arise. One way would be through extension of existing networks, possible building up of regional research networks.

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And the way I’d see it developing is that this other kind of science

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would not be seen as a rival to existing science,

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but in the end this could all be complementary to the professional science,

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the scientific establishment,

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and these two systems could cross-fertilize and influence each other,

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whereas now they proceed as if the other one hardly exists.

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So that’s my idea about the possibility of a new kind of science.

00:22:31 ► §

Well, that sounds wonderful and very promising. And if this could simply happen as you’ve described it,

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then the decline of science could be reversed.

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Clever young people could be attracted to more and better information

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and understanding could be developed and so on. And I certainly think that’s desirable,

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although I share with many ordinary people the decline of confidence in science for the reasons you’ve described, the acceptance of a new model of science,

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of grassroots science, of major developments, must say, given birth by amateur groups and

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so on, the acceptance of all this by the scientific establishment seems very unlikely somehow. The population of the scientific establishment would have to be totally swapped out

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with new young people coming in who had grown up in these new style groups.

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And of course that’s a possibility.

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I worry though about how, I mean this would have to evolve

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through a series of developments difficult to envision at this time.

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But I see a problem in the communication, the extension of the networks,

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and the sharing of the results,

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and the replacement of the function of big science provided by publication in journals with peer review and so on.

00:24:06 ► §

I hate the peer review process, but somehow the very growth of population,

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the growth of civilization, the growth of the scientific establishment,

00:24:16 ► §

means there’s this immense amount of data that if it’s not shared or made available

00:24:21 ► §

or archived in libraries or something, nobody can access it,

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then it fails to achieve the goal of these discoveries.

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That’s the problem.

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So I think the key to this development of a new model would be the development of a new model of a communication system

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for sharing the results of research.

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It won’t be necessary.

00:24:45 ► §

communication system for sharing the results of research will be necessary. It won’t be possible for each group of pigeon fanciers in South Burlington,

00:24:50 ► §

Vermont or something to have a journal or newsletter or something like that,

00:24:56 ► §

a regional newsletter.

00:24:58 ► §

That would be too many newsletters to read.

00:25:01 ► §

So I think the secret key to empower the success of this new development is the

00:25:08 ► §

communications aspect of the computer revolution, the bulletin boards, the computer networks,

00:25:14 ► §

and developments not yet really visioned for the archiving and sharing of this kind of

00:25:26 ► §

archiving and sharing of this kind of information in central electronic libraries.

00:25:28 ► §

That would be the key.

00:25:46 ► §

And until everyone could access the results of this research and easily survey all what had been done in a certain area and find out about these new hybrids and so on,

00:25:51 ► §

that the dream couldn’t really become a reality.

00:25:54 ► §

Maybe it requires further development in the archiving and sharing of electronic information

00:25:57 ► §

in order to make this possible.

00:26:01 ► §

How would regional networks be organized and communicate with each other?

00:26:08 ► §

It could be that the lack of a successful means of communicating that way

00:26:13 ► §

is the very reason that these big laboratories and big science have actually evolved.

00:26:19 ► §

The governments have sensed, they have tried, they’ve experimented,

00:26:26 ► §

have sensed, they have tried, they’ve experimented, and they’ve proved to their own satisfaction that the investment of the bucks in a big laboratory gives a bigger bang than in granting

00:26:37 ► §

smaller sums to a large number of small laboratories.

00:26:40 ► §

Certainly these groups will need grants.

00:26:43 ► §

They’ll need some support.

00:26:44 ► §

You have to have some equipment. In inexpensive science still does cost, right?

00:26:50 ► §

Well, I mean, the thing is that if you take, say, pigeon fanciers, they already have journals, Pigeon Racing Weekly and so on,

00:26:58 ► §

and there are several in England on newsstands, they already have newsletters, none of them get grants,

00:27:05 ► §

on newsstands. They already have newsletters. None of them get grants. They buy their own pigeons, race them, maintain them, breed them. There’s a system of competitions or prizes

00:27:11 ► §

for successful winners of races. But the whole thing is completely self-financing.

00:27:16 ► §

Now, the idea I had in mind was in cooperation with these different communities of researchers

00:27:23 ► §

or practitioners who already exist,

00:27:26 ► §

one would pose certain questions like, how do racing pigeons home?

00:27:31 ► §

Now, I have my own ideas about how this could be tested.

00:27:36 ► §

For example, by moving the loft from the pigeons, seeing if they can find the loft.

00:27:42 ► §

This is one of the experiments in the book I’m writing.

00:27:45 ► §

Well, this kind of question, when formulated,

00:27:49 ► §

put out there in the racing pigeon press

00:27:52 ► §

and in the existing newsletters,

00:27:55 ► §

might engage a certain number of people

00:27:57 ► §

in wanting to do these experiments.

00:27:58 ► §

The results would be fed in through these existing networks

00:28:02 ► §

of information to others,

00:28:03 ► §

and there would be a debate

00:28:05 ► §

and other people perhaps take part and the whole of this community could be engaged in certain

00:28:10 ► §

kinds of research projects now in relation to say amateur naturalists um a project that

00:28:18 ► §

i’m trying to get going in in london where i live in hampstead, is that on Hampstead Heath there’s several species of trees

00:28:28 ► §

showing very advanced signs of dieback or actual death.

00:28:32 ► §

The London plane tree is dying off all over London,

00:28:35 ► §

which will totally affect the appearance of the city.

00:28:38 ► §

Willow trees are in a bad way.

00:28:41 ► §

Acacias are in a very bad way.

00:28:43 ► §

Some species are not quite so bad. And opinions

00:28:48 ► §

most people hardly noticed. But those who have noticed have different opinions as to

00:28:54 ► §

why this is so. We’ve had two or three years of drought. There are certain fungus diseases

00:28:59 ► §

around. There’s an enormous increase in ozone and atmospheric pollution due to increased car traffic in London, photochemical smogs.

00:29:09 ► §

Which of these are affecting it?

00:29:11 ► §

And as the greenhouse effect begins to bite, as the temperature changes,

00:29:16 ► §

what kinds of changes will occur in forest ecosystems?

00:29:20 ► §

There’s nobody keeping records.

00:29:22 ► §

The Heath authorities are busy rushing around,

00:29:24 ► §

mending the drains and sort of clearing the rubbish.

00:29:28 ► §

The preservation societies are busy trying to stop people

00:29:31 ► §

cutting things down and spoiling the Heath

00:29:33 ► §

by building new police radio towers on it and that kind of thing.

00:29:38 ► §

But there’s nobody at present keeping a year-by-year record

00:29:41 ► §

of what’s happening.

00:29:43 ► §

So posing the questions is part of it.

00:29:46 ► §

And if amateur naturalist groups had clearly posed questions,

00:29:50 ► §

like is there a year-by-year change in the bird population, the tree population,

00:29:56 ► §

which trees are suffering, which ones are doing better,

00:29:59 ► §

we would have an enormous database gathered from different parts of the world,

00:30:04 ► §

which would be of practical value,

00:30:06 ► §

for example, in what you do about global climate change, if the greenhouse effect is really

00:30:10 ► §

happening, which it seems to be. If the climate of Britain gets warmer and drier, for example,

00:30:18 ► §

what kinds of trees should be planted on Hempstead Heath now, so that in 50 or 100 years’ time,

00:30:24 ► §

well within the lifetime of the tree planted today,

00:30:27 ► §

there’s a reasonable chance of them surviving

00:30:29 ► §

rather than the whole place being an ecological disaster zone.

00:30:33 ► §

And this is a very small…

00:30:35 ► §

I mean, I take this because it’s a very small example,

00:30:37 ► §

but there’s a much bigger question.

00:30:39 ► §

What kind of crops would grow in changing climate?

00:30:41 ► §

What changes occur in existing forests and existing ecosystems.

00:30:47 ► §

So it’s not just a matter of enormous accumulation of data without any kind of…

00:30:53 ► §

That’s happening already.

00:30:54 ► §

These amateur groups build up enormous data banks which they share through networks and

00:30:59 ► §

newsletters already in place.

00:31:01 ► §

But for a larger picture and for the asking of specific questions,

00:31:05 ► §

there could be a system whereby these questions

00:31:08 ► §

are fed through these local networks

00:31:11 ► §

or formulated with the help of people within them.

00:31:14 ► §

And there could be a vastly greater research effort

00:31:17 ► §

going on than there is now.

00:31:20 ► §

And I don’t think it would necessarily require

00:31:22 ► §

a big change in the present system.

00:31:26 ► §

Some of them, I’m sure, are using computer networks already.

00:31:28 ► §

Others have existing systems of information exchange,

00:31:35 ► §

like newspapers, journals, commercially produced magazines.

00:31:39 ► §

The rabbit fence here, you know, there’s all these things.

00:31:41 ► §

Incredible number of specialized journals are actually published

00:31:44 ► §

and are self-sustaining financially.

00:31:48 ► §

So I think it’s partly a question of formulating questions that are of a wider interest than

00:31:54 ► §

the nuts and bolts questions asked within these existing groups or within groups that

00:32:01 ► §

could come into being and sending and into a larger picture. And that, I think, is the way

00:32:08 ► §

that the research could be

00:32:11 ► §

coordinated somehow through particular kinds of questions.

00:32:18 ► §

Yes, well,

00:32:21 ► §

if interesting questions

00:32:24 ► §

came along from a central authority or an interesting amateur,

00:32:32 ► §

as, for example, your book, your forthcoming book,

00:32:36 ► §

and this captured the attention, the imagination of groups worldwide,

00:32:41 ► §

and then they accumulated their data pertinent to the question in the

00:32:46 ► §

standard form readable by other groups, and so on. Then a bigger picture, regional or

00:32:54 ► §

global picture of certain phenomena like the death of plane trees could be developed. But

00:33:03 ► §

it might need, in order to synthesize all this information, a really large map, a computer

00:33:08 ► §

graphic display or something that would be

00:33:10 ► §

two steps beyond the budget of these small groups.

00:33:16 ► §

Maybe there would be a secondary network where the primary pigeon pens

00:33:20 ► §

use, and so I’m doing research with how many pigeons are moving

00:33:24 ► §

home. They would create their

00:33:28 ► §

primary data, stimulated by a certain question, and then the secondary groups would access

00:33:35 ► §

the data from other centers and other countries and other continents and so on, try to test

00:33:42 ► §

certain hypotheses about the rate of advance, the strength of the morphogenetic

00:33:47 ► §

field, the distant effect, the speed of the effect, and so on.

00:33:52 ► §

Probably for all this to happen, it would require a substantial motivation, because

00:33:58 ► §

these amateur groups have habits.

00:34:04 ► §

amateur groups have habits.

00:34:07 ► §

Their habits are their 19th century groups,

00:34:12 ► §

their survival of the grassroots science of the past,

00:34:19 ► §

and some kind of broadcasting of their results to central labs or secondary research groups trying to develop a larger picture,

00:34:24 ► §

a global picture that’s not part of their habit.

00:34:27 ► §

So to make this transformation from their habit to a new mode would require some kind of compelling motivation.

00:34:35 ► §

And I think that this mention of global environmental problems is touching on what may very well be the powerful motivation that

00:34:48 ► §

would incline these groups to attain to a higher level of cooperativity among themselves

00:34:53 ► §

on a global scale. That’s really what’s needed is increasing the connectivity between these

00:34:59 ► §

groups as in a neural net, you increase the connectivity and then global patterns form.

00:35:06 ► §

So I think in the context of this idea that bad news is good news,

00:35:13 ► §

that the rapidly approaching environmental problems,

00:35:19 ► §

and personally I’m worried more about global coolingant than global warming. But in any case, a global change is going to simulate a global response, I think.

00:35:30 ► §

And that might be the way in which the revival of grassroots science

00:35:36 ► §

takes its strongest motivation.

00:35:39 ► §

What do you think, Terry?

00:35:41 ► §

Well, I’m as interested in the next person as in the reform of big science

00:35:48 ► §

the way I would choose to react to Rupert’s statement

00:35:55 ► §

is rather than see it as actually a practical plan

00:36:00 ► §

for the reform of science

00:36:02 ► §

to see it more as a proposal that can serve to show us what’s wrong with science

00:36:11 ► §

and how far off the track we’ve come.

00:36:16 ► §

My questions would address four areas which all arise, I think, from the same problem that I see with it. First of all,

00:36:30 ► §

instrumentality. The grassroots science, you called it 19th century, Ralph. Grassroots

00:36:39 ► §

science can be done with rather tangible problems. But if you’re interested in the neutrino output of the sun

00:36:49 ► §

or something like this, instrumentalities of great cost are necessary. And I think that science has

00:37:00 ► §

not only moved from the easy problems to the hard problems in its evolution over the past thousand years,

00:37:08 ► §

it’s also moved from the cheap problems to the expensive problems,

00:37:14 ► §

and that it is now wedded to instrumentalities of such size and cost that even nations seem to need to band together,

00:37:27 ► §

for instance, the Super Collider Project or the proposed joint Soviet-Mars expedition.

00:37:34 ► §

I don’t think there’s any way for grassroots science to finance and execute an expedition to Mars.

00:37:43 ► §

and execute an expedition to Mars.

00:37:47 ► §

So I’ve made three areas of concern.

00:37:54 ► §

Instrumentality, meaning scientific instruments of great cost.

00:38:06 ► §

Technology, the fact that science is the handmaiden of advanced product research, is what has given it such overwhelming sway over most of our lives.

00:38:11 ► §

Science is not done in the spirit of Greek curiosity about the order of nature.

00:38:19 ► §

Science is done to make money on a vast scale.

00:38:23 ► §

to make money on a vast scale. And I dare say no funding would be forthcoming

00:38:29 ► §

if there was no anticipated payback from that funding.

00:38:34 ► §

So then that leads to capitalism.

00:38:37 ► §

What is its role in the promotion of big science over small science and how can the impulse to do pure science in the

00:38:50 ► §

greek style or the grassroots style somehow be unlocked from the demands of capitalism which

00:38:59 ► §

distort that impulse so that we may spend hundreds of millions of dollars

00:39:07 ► §

discovering whether certain chemicals that will go into a facial soap or

00:39:11 ► §

Allergenic or not, but we wouldn’t allocate

00:39:15 ► §

a hundred thousand dollars to study a very basic and interesting question like how the pigeons home

00:39:22 ► §

and then

00:39:24 ► §

fourthly, and along the same continuum,

00:39:28 ► §

science has been appropriated by the military-industrial complex.

00:39:34 ► §

And again, this would be very hard to see how it could be disentangled from that so I see your proposal as not so much a

00:39:47 ► §

proposal for the reform of science but for the creation of a kind of parallel

00:39:53 ► §

institution we could almost call it the people’s science or or science hands-on

00:40:01 ► §

science how and I just like to hear you address all these things,

00:40:07 ► §

and I’m all for the idea, but I think science has been vastly transformed from the simple

00:40:14 ► §

impulse to understand the natural world around us into a kind of hellish marriage with capitalism,

00:40:29 ► §

a kind of hellish marriage with capitalism, technology, enormous instruments, and the military-industrial complex, and that I’ve probably named some of the most overwhelming

00:40:36 ► §

and monolithic forces in our society.

00:40:52 ► §

How can we rescue dame science from the hands of such intractable foes of the Greek and original impulse to simply understand and appreciate the natural world?

00:41:20 ► §

Well, I think part of the answer comes from the shift in paradigm which is happening for a variety of reasons, independent, well, not independent, but seemingly independent of these political and economic ones, namely the move towards a more holistic model of science. And as I said earlier, the holistic research where you look at whole systems is

00:41:27 ► §

much cheaper than analytical research where you look at smaller systems. You see, atomism,

00:41:33 ► §

which is the philosophy that underlies reductionism, puts the greatest emphasis on the smallest

00:41:38 ► §

possible things. Hence, the highest prestige attaches to superconducting superconductors,

00:41:44 ► §

the highest prestige attaches to superconducting superconductors,

00:41:47 ► §

which are the biggest pieces of apparatus you can make,

00:41:51 ► §

because the smaller the thing, the bigger the apparatus.

00:41:56 ► §

Now, if we, as we are doing, undergo a shift of model,

00:41:59 ► §

so that kind of science seems somewhat less interesting,

00:42:06 ► §

then the emphasis would become on studying the properties of molecules, of crystals at their own level, of cells, of organisms, of ecosystems

00:42:10 ► §

that kind of science requiring enormous increase in instrumentation

00:42:16 ► §

which goes together with a reductionistic approach

00:42:19 ► §

would simply become less important, less relevant, less attractive

00:42:24 ► §

and that would in itself help to take care of the instrumental problem would simply become less important, less relevant, less attractive.

00:42:29 ► §

And that would in itself help to take care of the instrumental problem.

00:42:32 ► §

You can see the same thing in medicine.

00:42:37 ► §

If you have a medical research system that we’ve got now,

00:42:40 ► §

entirely in the service of mechanistic medicine,

00:42:46 ► §

then the emphasis goes on new methods of biochemical diagnosis genetic engineering, diagnostic aids, high-tech scanning equipment and so on

00:42:53 ► §

and no research money at all in most countries

00:42:57 ► §

goes into looking at the effects of other holistic methods

00:43:01 ► §

which meanwhile flourish even in small towns around the Western world.

00:43:09 ► §

All the different kinds of holistic approaches that go on.

00:43:13 ► §

There’s not really much effort to compare these approaches to see which works better than others.

00:43:19 ► §

There are a few small-scale projects, but it’s clear that the economics of the medical system

00:43:26 ► §

which at present are escalating

00:43:28 ► §

costs which mean the cost of insurance

00:43:30 ► §

or the cost of socialised medicine

00:43:32 ► §

and countries with it like Britain

00:43:34 ► §

are constantly spiralling upwards

00:43:36 ► §

and provoking a whole crisis in the

00:43:38 ► §

healthcare system. Now

00:43:40 ► §

for political reasons alone

00:43:42 ► §

in Britain there’s an increasing

00:43:44 ► §

willingness of for political reasons alone in Britain, there’s an increasing willingness of, for economic reasons really, of politicians to consider the possibility of holistic medicine simply because it’s cheaper.

00:44:05 ► §

far as expensive scans and that kind of thing by people doing more meditation taking a few homeopathic pills and that kind of thing have acupuncture this kind of thing could lead to

00:44:13 ► §

far cheaper medical insurance it could lead to a much cheaper and more comprehensive health

00:44:19 ► §

service in countries that have comprehensive health services. And it would lead to a completely different kind of medical research.

00:44:27 ► §

I mean, how in this context,

00:44:29 ► §

which would be very relevant to medical insurance companies,

00:44:32 ► §

which already in some cases insure people

00:44:34 ► §

with chiropractors, osteopaths, acupuncturists and so on.

00:44:41 ► §

One way of going about this on the grassroots method i’ve suggested would be simply a survey

00:44:48 ► §

method a systematic survey carried out by students or local communities going around asking people

00:44:55 ► §

what diseases they’ve had how they think they’ve been cured and how they rate the effectiveness of

00:45:00 ► §

the different systems they’ve had this is in fact the word of mouth method is how one gets to know about things like acupuncture you hear somebody’s had something they say it’s

00:45:09 ► §

been cured by acupuncture you go to them someone’s got a bad back it’s a chiropractor that cures it

00:45:14 ► §

not going into an advanced surgical ward in some cases that works but for most people these

00:45:21 ► §

systems which are outside the purview of orthodox medicine and the AMA,

00:45:26 ► §

what were, can you hear about them by word of mouth?

00:45:29 ► §

A more systematic approach you see would be systematically to survey people’s experience.

00:45:35 ► §

You have like a consumer report on these systems

00:45:39 ► §

and this could be done at any level of sophistication or depth.

00:45:43 ► §

And if it worked in the West, then you could extend it to India,

00:45:48 ► §

where these different systems, Ayurvedic, the Unani system of Muslims,

00:45:53 ► §

the homeopathic system, the Western system,

00:45:57 ► §

traditional forms of spiritual healing, all coexist.

00:46:00 ► §

And every Indian I talked to when I was living there

00:46:03 ► §

had quite clear ideas about which one worked for which.

00:46:06 ► §

For jaundice, you wouldn’t go to a Western doctor

00:46:09 ► §

because they were hopeless.

00:46:10 ► §

You’d go to a Ayurvedic or a Hakim, a Yunani Hakim,

00:46:13 ► §

because they had good cures for jaundice.

00:46:15 ► §

For acute illnesses, you’d go to Western doctors

00:46:18 ► §

and get antibiotics.

00:46:20 ► §

For skin, long-term chronic skin complaints,

00:46:23 ► §

you’d go to homeopaths.

00:46:24 ► §

For mental diseases, you go to temples or to some kind of faith-healing thing in a Daghara Muslim shrine.

00:46:31 ► §

There’s a wealth of knowledge there which is nowhere codified, nowhere investigated,

00:46:37 ► §

as part of an ongoing, continuously modified oral tradition.

00:46:42 ► §

And so in the realm of medical research too, I think this method could be applied quite cheaply and simply without instruments.

00:46:49 ► §

It would in fact give one a method of estimating the effectiveness of instruments

00:46:54 ► §

through high-tech medicine.

00:46:56 ► §

So I think that as soon as you begin to look holistically at things,

00:46:59 ► §

the need for large instruments disappears.

00:47:03 ► §

And it may be that if we think differently about the need for missions to Mars,

00:47:09 ► §

the need for Star Wars, the need for the Human Genome Project,

00:47:13 ► §

and the need for large-scale nuclear physics projects in this new context

00:47:19 ► §

may seem much less important, and hence the process you talked about,

00:47:24 ► §

the need for these instrument

00:47:25 ► §

instrumentation would get less then when it comes to you know the power of capitalism military

00:47:33 ► §

industrial complex again the power of these things are changing the the the interests of

00:47:39 ► §

health insurance companies and the interests of national health systems are not working in favour necessarily of ever more expensive medicine.

00:47:48 ► §

There are political forces working in different directions.

00:47:51 ► §

With the end of the Cold War,

00:47:52 ► §

the need for vast high-tech military spending projects

00:47:56 ► §

is going to become harder to defend politically.

00:48:00 ► §

And so I think that the situation is changing quite rapidly

00:48:04 ► §

in all these respects

00:48:06 ► §

well what you seem to be advocating is the collection and correlation and study of data

00:48:15 ► §

as something which doesn’t cost a lot of money and which can be done on home computers

00:48:21 ► §

and transferred among self-organized networks of people.

00:48:26 ► §

And I agree that probably the forward rush of big science has ignored a lot of areas,

00:48:43 ► §

extraterrestrial planetologists

00:48:47 ► §

or to the

00:48:49 ► §

astrophysicists

00:48:51 ► §

or to the

00:48:53 ► §

molecular biologists

00:48:55 ► §

it seems there are large

00:48:57 ► §

areas of science which have

00:48:59 ► §

become so wedded

00:49:00 ► §

to the need for

00:49:02 ► §

instrumentalities of great cost that there is no way to do them

00:49:09 ► §

without vast research programs and enormously expensive instruments.

00:49:17 ► §

So what you’re really focusing on, I think, is not so much a downsizing of science as a refocusing of it on the biological,

00:49:30 ► §

medical, and sociological domain

00:49:34 ► §

as opposed to…

00:49:37 ► §

Highly warranted.

00:49:38 ► §

Highly warranted, but can this be done?

00:49:42 ► §

I mean, it’s extreme, the inertia of the other forms of science

00:49:48 ► §

to tell the physicists that the exploration of matter will be halted,

00:49:53 ► §

to tell the astrophysicists that the exploration of the galaxy will be halted,

00:50:01 ► §

to tell the oceanographers that the exploration of the deep sea will be halted, to tell the oceanographers that the exploration of the deep sea will

00:50:06 ► §

be halted, is not entirely in the service of the original Greek impulse to understand

00:50:16 ► §

nature.

00:50:17 ► §

They’re going to be told that anyway.

00:50:19 ► §

They are being told already in Britain.

00:50:20 ► §

I mean, nuclear physics has been shut down. There’s a budget crisis, and

00:50:25 ► §

the…

00:50:27 ► §

Even if popular support

00:50:29 ► §

remained tremendous for

00:50:31 ► §

sub-nuclear particle research,

00:50:34 ► §

there would…

00:50:36 ► §

The budget

00:50:37 ► §

crisis would make it impossible

00:50:40 ► §

to continue in that line,

00:50:41 ► §

even if everybody wanted to.

00:50:43 ► §

Meanwhile, we have new crises.

00:50:46 ► §

You see, this nuclear physics was a response to urgent need

00:50:54 ► §

in the military-industrial complex, as you pointed out.

00:50:57 ► §

They needed this defense against aggression and so on.

00:51:00 ► §

Now we have a new problem, and the defense departments

00:51:03 ► §

of the various nations are going to have to do about-face and reorient themselves toward the real enemy now.

00:51:26 ► §

or climatological data on the die-off of trees in Britain,

00:51:31 ► §

it occurred to me recently there’s been a debate in the scientific community saying that all ground-based temperature observations have to be thrown out of the model

00:51:40 ► §

because only if you look down from space on an environment do you actually get data which is not contaminated by local effects.

00:51:54 ► §

So in some cases, it seems there’s going to have to be a continued reliance on…

00:52:01 ► §

All right, we acknowledge that big science is going to continue to exist,

00:52:06 ► §

but it’s got to, first of all,

00:52:09 ► §

economize,

00:52:11 ► §

secondly, reorient itself

00:52:13 ► §

toward real problems,

00:52:15 ► §

not only to maintain popular support,

00:52:18 ► §

to maintain any support,

00:52:20 ► §

maintain any population of scientists

00:52:22 ► §

to do it,

00:52:23 ► §

and thirdly,

00:52:24 ► §

it’s got to reintegrate with grassroots science

00:52:27 ► §

because of economies and also because the information on that level is needed.

00:52:33 ► §

I think that the new model for big science is going to be

00:52:38 ► §

data banks together with scientific visualization strategies based on computer graphics,

00:52:44 ► §

together with scientific visualization strategies based on computer graphics,

00:52:50 ► §

which, as you’ve correctly implied, is expensive.

00:52:56 ► §

The mission to planet Earth, the NASA proposal to monitor the temperature everywhere from satellites, will actually be very inexpensive compared to ground-based methods of collecting the same data.

00:53:04 ► §

The problem is how to visualize it.

00:53:06 ► §

And there we see groups working at the national laboratory level

00:53:10 ► §

with enormous supercomputers that are really expensive

00:53:13 ► §

trying to devise ways to synthesize all this data

00:53:17 ► §

and sort of get the picture.

00:53:19 ► §

So I think the new challenge for big science will be

00:53:24 ► §

they’ll still have maybe more moderate budgets,

00:53:27 ► §

but they will have to be focused in big laboratories with big supercomputers

00:53:31 ► §

and with huge disks holding all this accumulated data.

00:53:37 ► §

The mission to planet Earth will be broadcasting down from these satellites

00:53:40 ► §

terabytes, terabytes per minute of information that has to go somewhere.

00:53:48 ► §

And until that’s figured out, which will be expensive, we can’t have any, I don’t think

00:53:53 ► §

we’ll really get the benefit from all this grassroots science, either what exists today

00:53:58 ► §

or what would be developed in the future in response to some really exciting new questions proposed from a larger view

00:54:07 ► §

of global planetary behavior. Certainly, the physical sciences have harmed more than their

00:54:14 ► §

share of the national budgets for science. And as Rupert pointed out at the beginning,

00:54:22 ► §

the growing tendency of biological science to imitate this bad strategy of the physical scientists

00:54:28 ► §

in putting all their eggs in one basket with giant machines and fewer laboratories and journals and so on.

00:54:36 ► §

This is a bad direction because it’s a dead-end street.

00:54:39 ► §

This actually represents the devolution of science, led at the most rapid possible rate by the physical scientists,

00:54:47 ► §

the astronomers with their huge telescopes, and so on.

00:54:53 ► §

The piece of the budget pie for science is shrinking.

00:54:58 ► §

Even if it didn’t, it would have to be reorganized

00:55:01 ► §

so that a fair share went to medical, biological,

00:55:03 ► §

and also social and environmental

00:55:06 ► §

sciences, then everyone’s budget is still going to be too small. And to get the largest result

00:55:16 ► §

from the fixed budget, I still think it’ll be necessary to have some big science, big lab

00:55:22 ► §

centers where the synthesis of all the information will be,

00:55:26 ► §

and will be the largest problem of science in the future,

00:55:30 ► §

is just to manage this numerous database.

00:55:34 ► §

And the fact that the physical scientists have got their unjustified piece of the pie so far

00:55:40 ► §

is, I think, because within their big budgets, which still aren’t infinite,

00:55:45 ► §

so far is, I think, because within their big budgets, which still aren’t infinite, they’ve been able to produce a result because they don’t have to deal with data banks that are

00:55:53 ► §

of unmanageable size. They’re studying simple systems, and within their budget, they’ve

00:55:59 ► §

been able to deliver a product, something that can be adapted by business for new high-tech commodities,

00:56:13 ► §

gadgets and consumer.

00:56:16 ► §

Well, maybe we should think of it as establishing a sort of parallel track of re-humanized science, but retain things like the Human Genome Project, which

00:56:30 ► §

promises a much deeper understanding of human disease and genetic defects and this sort

00:56:38 ► §

of thing.

00:56:51 ► §

The other thing is institutions expect a payoff on the investment they make in the people they train,

00:56:57 ► §

and somehow they are going to have to be talked out of this payback,

00:57:05 ► §

because big science has been the tent under which product development and that sort of thing has gone on,

00:57:09 ► §

which has then led to the payback into the universities so that these laboratories could be endowed and so forth and so on.

00:57:13 ► §

It’s very hard to see how in the small science model

00:57:18 ► §

it closes the loop and pays its own way.

00:57:23 ► §

It has more the quality of the English squire or naturalist

00:57:29 ► §

who carries out observations in his local area that are very interesting, but that only

00:57:36 ► §

his private wealth allows him the luxury of doing this. How will it support itself? How will it be other than something in the hands of hobbyists and dilettantes?

00:57:55 ► §

Well, there are two things that could happen there.

00:57:58 ► §

One is that, well, already amateurs do these things on quite a large scale.

00:58:06 ► §

Pigeon fanciers, of whom there are about 500,000 in Britain,

00:58:10 ► §

are mostly working class, and some of them are on social security.

00:58:14 ► §

The one I’ve worked with most closely can’t work.

00:58:17 ► §

He’s got a disease. He’s on social security.

00:58:20 ► §

It’s so cheap that you can do it on that level.

00:58:22 ► §

This isn’t just the province of squires.

00:58:25 ► §

Maybe orchid growing is, if you need greenhouses.

00:58:28 ► §

But there are certain kinds of things which we live in a far more prosperous society than ever before.

00:58:35 ► §

So this kind of expenditure of your own money on what you really like is widely available.

00:58:42 ► §

Many, many people take advantage of it. Even if it’s only at the level of gardening,

00:58:47 ► §

and it’s one of the most popular of all hobbies,

00:58:51 ► §

people don’t need grants to buy plants for their garden,

00:58:55 ► §

and they wouldn’t need grants to graft different ones together

00:58:57 ► §

or to breed different ones by crossing them

00:59:00 ► §

or using a camel hair brush to transfer the pollen from one to another.

00:59:04 ► §

So plant breeding and things are so low budget,

00:59:07 ► §

they’re actually within the capacity of hundreds of thousands,

00:59:09 ► §

even millions of people already.

00:59:13 ► §

When it comes to the need for additional funding for data banks,

00:59:18 ► §

for things where you do need other things,

00:59:23 ► §

I think there could be a new system

00:59:25 ► §

of, they could be regional

00:59:26 ► §

research councils, they could be

00:59:28 ► §

I mean there’s various structures you can think of

00:59:30 ► §

where a tiny fraction, 1%,

00:59:33 ► §

0.1%

00:59:34 ► §

of existing science budgets

00:59:36 ► §

were put in funding this

00:59:38 ► §

grassroots science

00:59:40 ► §

together with a series of competitions.

00:59:43 ► §

I in fact suggested one to the editor

00:59:44 ► §

of Nature

00:59:45 ► §

when he told me about this increasing complexity

00:59:48 ► §

and cost of research as the tendency

00:59:50 ► §

I said well why not offer a $10,000 prize every year

00:59:54 ► §

the Nature Prize for the best research

00:59:56 ► §

conducted on a budget of less than £1,000

00:59:59 ► §

and he said there’s no point because no one would enter for it

01:00:04 ► §

and I said I would and he said well then I don because no one would enter for it and I said I would

01:00:05 ► §

and he said well then I don’t think we’ll offer the prize

01:00:08 ► §

but the possibility you see

01:00:16 ► §

I’ve found in my own experience

01:00:18 ► §

that prizes act as quite a strong motivation for people

01:00:21 ► §

in morphic resonance research

01:00:23 ► §

the most recent competition results

01:00:25 ► §

have just been announced for student projects.

01:00:28 ► §

There was a $5,000 prize

01:00:30 ► §

to be shared between three people worldwide.

01:00:35 ► §

This motivated some very interesting research.

01:00:38 ► §

And so a tiny fraction of existing science

01:00:41 ► §

or education budgets devoted to funding

01:00:43 ► §

this grassroots network would be politically popular

01:00:46 ► §

because it would be far more politically popular

01:00:48 ► §

than the 99% devoted to big science and existing projects

01:00:53 ► §

because it would touch far more people

01:00:54 ► §

and give more visible results.

01:00:58 ► §

And because the kind of budgets we’re talking about are so small,

01:01:02 ► §

a little amount of money would go a very long way.

01:01:06 ► §

So I’m not saying it wouldn’t need funding,

01:01:07 ► §

but the amount of funding would be so small

01:01:09 ► §

compared with existing science budgets,

01:01:11 ► §

you’d hardly notice it,

01:01:13 ► §

this deflection of a tiny percentage of existing budgets in this direction.

01:01:17 ► §

Yes, that’s right.

01:01:18 ► §

Well, don’t you think, though, that the public support for science

01:01:23 ► §

is based on the expectation that it will usher in

01:01:29 ► §

new technologies, which the mass of people have a great faith that these new technologies will

01:01:37 ► §

then deliver them into a somehow better world. And if you break that chain of expectations and say no well we’re now going to do science in

01:01:47 ► §

such a way that you can forget about new technologies that the interest in science

01:01:54 ► §

will decline to the level of the interest in support of tournament go or something

01:02:00 ► §

just think of i mean we were talking about the revolution of science in the context of a major paradigm shift in which it would be but one component.

01:02:11 ► §

And one of the things we’re anticipating in the future are these global environmental problems.

01:02:18 ► §

They are already here.

01:02:19 ► §

So people, I think, in the future are going to expect from science, from government, from religion, from themselves,

01:02:28 ► §

the salvation from these serious problems.

01:02:31 ► §

Just as now for medical science, they want the cure of cancer and AIDS.

01:02:34 ► §

Solutions.

01:02:35 ► §

They want a solution. They don’t want products.

01:02:37 ► §

No, but they want solutions.

01:02:39 ► §

They want solutions.

01:02:40 ► §

And in order for this to be forthcoming for the grassroots science,

01:02:44 ► §

well, for a science project to participate in the solution of these problems, which would be emerging in order to,

01:03:06 ► §

you know, under the pressure of the evolutionary pressure of environmental problems,

01:03:13 ► §

that means that the new science, grassroots science,

01:03:17 ► §

would have to link up in an effective way with journals,

01:03:22 ► §

with glossy magazines like Scientific American and so on,

01:03:25 ► §

presenting the progress that they do make toward solutions of major problems.

01:03:33 ► §

Alongside the results of the big laboratories and everybody else,

01:03:36 ► §

it’s not enough to offer competitions and prizes.

01:03:40 ► §

You must also offer the possibility of publication, access to the publication, which can garner the public support

01:03:49 ► §

that nourishes amateur as well as professional scientists.

01:03:55 ► §

Well, take as a test case, and it’s also a very real dilemma,

01:04:01 ► §

the depletion of the ozone hole.

01:04:09 ► §

dilemma, the depletion of the ozone hole. To even study this requires the cooperation of Air Force’s massive data acquisition and analysis facilities and

01:04:17 ► §

when you move from studying it to doing something about it, it may take a

01:04:22 ► §

significant portion of every dollar the

01:04:25 ► §

rest of we all make for the rest of our lives and the fate of the planet may

01:04:31 ► §

hang in the balance. Now how can a grassroots science make a contribution to that?

01:04:37 ► §

The ozone hole was first observed in a federal laboratory,

01:04:45 ► §

which had collected data that it neglected to study.

01:04:51 ► §

So when amateur scientists would have had,

01:04:56 ► §

if amateur scientists would have had access to the data sitting in this archive,

01:05:02 ► §

then they might, and anyone might, anyone with that access might have

01:05:07 ► §

made the discovery of the ozone hole. In fact, the person who discovered it was the person

01:05:11 ► §

who collected the data, but it was several years later. Also, the ozone hole was originally

01:05:18 ► §

thought to be totally isolated over the poles, but now they’ve discovered this vortex mixing, that the ozone

01:05:28 ► §

holes of the poles are gradually sucking ozone from the temperate regions. So if amateur

01:05:36 ► §

scientists had ozone observers, which are little telescopes, simple device, looks straight up, measure the ozone density over their own home,

01:05:48 ► §

then it’s just like the pine trees,

01:05:51 ► §

the rate at which the ozone depletion is diffusing over the population centuries

01:05:56 ► §

would then be observed by amateur scientists,

01:05:58 ► §

where it might very well be overlooked by the large laboratories

01:06:02 ► §

that exclusively devote their research to these high-flying U2s that go over the polar regions.

01:06:10 ► §

And to do something about it?

01:06:13 ► §

I could envision a new model in which big science existed as it does today on a lower budget.

01:06:20 ► §

Grassroots science existed as it does today on a larger budget.

01:06:24 ► §

grassroots science existed as it does today on a larger budget.

01:06:30 ► §

And the two are coupled together much more tightly through information sharing mechanisms.

01:06:33 ► §

The National Science Foundation, for example, in the United States, might have as its main mission the storage and provision of access to this enormous data

01:06:41 ► §

so that people can come with a new hypothesis, a new question, a small competition stimulating high school students

01:06:48 ► §

who could then actually obtain the data that no one is looking at

01:06:51 ► §

about the ozone depletion or something else

01:06:53 ► §

and win the prize by making a phenomenal new discovery

01:06:58 ► §

of data which maybe is sitting around and has been provided by some very expensive instrument.

01:07:05 ► §

That’s the combination.

01:07:07 ► §

So it seems to be, we keep returning to this thing,

01:07:10 ► §

that the big science provides the data,

01:07:13 ► §

or the data is accessible by non-expensive local means,

01:07:19 ► §

but somehow the problem is to acquire the data.

01:07:26 ► §

And for many, many problems, I mean, I mentioned the ozone hole.

01:07:30 ► §

We could also talk about the danger of planetesimal impact on the Earth.

01:07:35 ► §

Things like or analyzing the effect of the Philippine volcanic eruption.

01:07:42 ► §

Philippine volcanic eruption.

01:07:45 ► §

Somehow the acquisition of this data sounds like it’s going to keep big science in business for a while.

01:07:50 ► §

And I believe, I absolutely agree with you,

01:07:53 ► §

there should be no such thing as classified scientific data.

01:07:57 ► §

That’s an obscene concept.

01:07:59 ► §

But I wonder if, at least at this stage in the technological revolution,

01:08:04 ► §

if at least at this stage in the technological revolution,

01:08:10 ► §

a Mach 2 is sufficient to deal with the data collected.

01:08:12 ► §

Perhaps it is.

01:08:19 ► §

But if not, then the small scientist remains at a disadvantage because number crunching is a part of the analysis

01:08:23 ► §

of the huge data stream that is coming in.

01:08:27 ► §

Maybe the answer is to concentrate on dropping the cost of supercomputing.

01:08:34 ► §

Well, that’s happening.

01:08:35 ► §

But that would require an enormous governmental project costing billions of dollars and so forth and so on,

01:08:41 ► §

the very thing we’re trying to get away from here.

01:08:44 ► §

I think the computer revolution is actually the answer to the main problem.

01:08:49 ► §

The prices are spontaneously dropping.

01:08:52 ► §

Supercomputer on the desk, the personal supercomputer, is a reality today.

01:08:56 ► §

It’ll be cheaper tomorrow, the Mac 3, the Mac 4, and so on.

01:09:00 ► §

Let’s take that for granted.

01:09:01 ► §

I still think…

01:09:02 ► §

But it will be brought to us by Apple Corporation, one of the largest

01:09:06 ► §

corporate entities in

01:09:07 ► §

the American capitalist mix.

01:09:10 ► §

It won’t be done by

01:09:11 ► §

two guys in a garage. That era

01:09:13 ► §

is gone forever.

01:09:15 ► §

Not well. I mean, you’re now concentrating

01:09:18 ► §

on these huge, like the ozone

01:09:20 ► §

hole problem, and how can you

01:09:21 ► §

apply it? First of all, how

01:09:23 ► §

the ozone hole, what do you do

01:09:25 ► §

about it? A lot more was done about that in Britain at least by amateur groups like Greenpeace

01:09:31 ► §

and Friends of the Earth, you know, people protesting to corporations about canisters

01:09:35 ► §

of this and protests about fridge recycling. These things, they gather data. They don’t

01:09:41 ► §

need huge number crunches. You need fairly simple data to turn doing something about into political action through existing

01:09:47 ► §

pressure groups secondly the question of

01:09:58 ► §

well no just let me was at that for the moment about the ozone hole the second

01:10:02 ► §

question about information gathering,

01:10:08 ► §

there isn’t in fact a glut of information in some areas.

01:10:09 ► §

There’s a great shortage.

01:10:15 ► §

Friends of the Earth also collect samples downstream from industrial firms in rivers and from drinking water supplies and find that in 30% of Britain

01:10:20 ► §

they exceed the nitrate levels permitted by British and EEC regulations.

01:10:24 ► §

Pesticide residue levels are far too high, etc.

01:10:27 ► §

Data which, if it’s collected at all by our government, is kept secret,

01:10:31 ► §

and which, when revealed and published, requiring no great sophistication of laboratories,

01:10:36 ► §

no enormous number crunches, can lead to enormous political knock-on effects,

01:10:40 ► §

questions in Parliament, letters in newspapers, public protests,

01:10:44 ► §

that can actually begin to do something about these things. So the environmental

01:10:48 ► §

groups have already used fairly simple analytical techniques, fairly simple data

01:10:53 ► §

processing methods to great effect. And so the ozone hole is, you know, that’s why I

01:10:58 ► §

don’t deny there’s a problem at that level, but there are problems at much

01:11:02 ► §

lower levels where an enormous greater amount

01:11:05 ► §

could be done by amateur data collection without vast number crunches and where the translation

01:11:10 ► §

into political effects doing something about it much sooner and quicker than to solving

01:11:15 ► §

enormous global climate problems well so i think we’re left with the conclusion that

01:11:21 ► §

there has to be a parallelism that somehow there’s room for both of these approaches,

01:11:28 ► §

that they address different areas of concern,

01:11:32 ► §

and that when they can make common cause, that’s all well and good,

01:11:36 ► §

but that they are really directed toward, in most cases, different ends.

01:11:42 ► §

Well, not necessarily, you see see because coming back to an earlier point

01:11:45 ► §

where you said that what people want in science is something that gives a product or something

01:11:49 ► §

useful or some public good that’s not really always true in some cases but think of the

01:11:57 ► §

things that are some of the most popular things in the whole of science that interest even three

01:12:02 ► §

year olds namely dinosaurs.

01:12:08 ► §

Science museums draw millions of people to them if they put on displays of dinosaurs.

01:12:11 ► §

Stephen Jay Gould sells millions of copies of his books

01:12:14 ► §

which are about things like dinosaurs, extinctions and so on.

01:12:19 ► §

The only form of popular science that interests Merlin, age three,

01:12:23 ► §

is dinosaurs.

01:12:24 ► §

He goes to halls of science to see dinosaurs.

01:12:27 ► §

And so the interesting thing is that there’s a kind of science here

01:12:31 ► §

which has an enormous grassroots base, which has nothing to do with…

01:12:36 ► §

But a major paleontological project has the character of a major dam building or excavation project.

01:12:44 ► §

I mean, it costs millions to…

01:12:45 ► §

Most of these bones were collected in the last century

01:12:48 ► §

by amateurs for virtually nothing.

01:12:53 ► §

It may cost millions to build these huge plastic models

01:12:57 ► §

that emit roaring noises

01:12:59 ► §

and are engineered to sort of…

01:13:00 ► §

Well, I’m talking about sinking a fossil shaft

01:13:04 ► §

somewhere in the Gobi Desert and extracting in a proper scientific manner the fossils therein over two years requires maintaining hundreds of people in the field from staff scientists down to coolies and the air transport. I’m paying about 50 cents a day.

01:13:25 ► §

And the air transport of hundreds of tons of rock back to…

01:13:29 ► §

It doesn’t have to be air transport.

01:13:30 ► §

I mean, paleontology was already a well-established science

01:13:34 ► §

in the 19th century on incredibly low budgets,

01:13:36 ► §

mostly funded by amateurs.

01:13:38 ► §

It’s a wonderful example of low-cost grassroots science.

01:13:41 ► §

Amateurs like Baron Guy de Rothschild.

01:13:45 ► §

But many others.

01:13:46 ► §

Many amateurs have played a part in the development of paleontology,

01:13:50 ► §

and it’s one of the most low-cost areas of science.

01:13:53 ► §

And it’s one with one of the highest public appeals.

01:13:58 ► §

Well, I don’t have that great of familiarity with paleontology,

01:14:02 ► §

but I do know something about archaeology,

01:14:07 ► §

and it costs a fortune, archaeology, to do it right.

01:14:11 ► §

A lot of expeditions were done on a very low budget.

01:14:14 ► §

For example, when Flinders Creek first went to…

01:14:17 ► §

But I’m talking about today, when you go into Guatemala or the Yucatan to excavate a Mayan site

01:14:25 ► §

to keep a team in the rainforest for six months…

01:14:30 ► §

Rupert hasn’t suggested to slash all budgets to zero,

01:14:34 ► §

and presumably these relatively expensive projects

01:14:39 ► §

will continue to be funded according to the degree

01:14:42 ► §

by which they can gain public support.

01:14:48 ► §

They provide exciting results, solve important problems, and so on.

01:14:53 ► §

They could be funded.

01:14:55 ► §

Simultaneously, they could be influenced enormously

01:14:58 ► §

by discoveries of the grassroots science group

01:15:02 ► §

feeding into the determination

01:15:05 ► §

of how this budget is supposed to be spent.

01:15:09 ► §

We might stick with archaeology for a moment here

01:15:12 ► §

because it’s an interesting science

01:15:15 ► §

in that it doesn’t generate new products.

01:15:19 ► §

It doesn’t give us a sense of progress.

01:15:29 ► §

It doesn’t feed into the military-industrial complex.

01:15:33 ► §

It seems almost the model of what we’re talking about,

01:15:37 ► §

and yet it’s absolutely famished for money for all those reasons.

01:15:39 ► §

And finds it very difficult to obtain funding.

01:15:45 ► §

An enormous amount of archaeology is funded and finds it very difficult to obtain funding.

01:15:51 ► §

An enormous amount of archaeology is funded by the patronage of wealthy enthusiasts.

01:16:00 ► §

And it’s not a happy experience to spend an evening with archaeologists

01:16:05 ► §

listening to them discuss the difficulties they’re having funding projects that they are, in a few minutes, able to convince you are very, very worthy and interesting.

01:16:12 ► §

Archaeology is almost the paradigm of the small science enterprise that we’re talking about,

01:16:19 ► §

and yet it seems beset with difficulties that may show us problems that we can anticipate if we try to expand this model.

01:16:31 ► §

Well, I mean, at the moment the archaeology budget, I’m sure,

01:16:35 ► §

is a tiny fraction of the 1% of the budget spent on the genome project Star Wars.

01:16:40 ► §

We’re talking the global archaeology budget must be, what, 10 million, 20 million, at most

01:16:45 ► §

50 million dollars

01:16:48 ► §

I should imagine.

01:16:49 ► §

And this is absolutely peanuts.

01:16:51 ► §

We’ll say it is an amateur science.

01:16:54 ► §

But it is an amateur science.

01:16:55 ► §

A lot of it is an amateur science and then it’s got this

01:16:57 ► §

professional end where they have to raise

01:16:59 ► §

funding often from private concerns

01:17:01 ► §

and so on, or wealthy donors.

01:17:03 ► §

It is an amateur science.

01:17:07 ► §

It has a large grassroots component even today.

01:17:10 ► §

You know, people who excavate in an amateur manner.

01:17:14 ► §

There are Anglo-Saxon excavations going on in Britain, for example,

01:17:18 ► §

using students in the vacations, amateurs and so on, with very minimal central funding from the government.

01:17:24 ► §

And so archaeology is actually a case in point.

01:17:26 ► §

It’s the model.

01:17:27 ► §

You’ve got a large grassroots base,

01:17:29 ► §

a large grassroots popular interest,

01:17:31 ► §

museums which can attract lots of people to see these things,

01:17:36 ► §

and even the biggest projects are relatively cheap

01:17:39 ► §

compared with large-scale science.

01:17:42 ► §

What’s happening now, you see,

01:17:43 ► §

is that what this discussion is proposing

01:17:46 ► §

is not that 100% of available funding

01:17:49 ► §

should go to grassroots science

01:17:51 ► §

and zero to existing institutional science,

01:17:54 ► §

but rather to change the present situation

01:17:56 ► §

where 100% goes to existing institutional science

01:17:59 ► §

and 0% to the more grassroots mode.

01:18:03 ► §

A shift in balance from 99% to institutional science

01:18:09 ► §

and 1% to grassroots science would totally turn around the situation,

01:18:13 ► §

change the popular base of science, its popular appeal,

01:18:16 ► §

and I think bring a whole new vigour and a whole new spirit into this scientific endeavour.

01:18:29 ► §

spirit into the scientific endeavor one further thing which is your particular realm of expertise psychedelic research it seems to me a very important

01:18:36 ► §

component of consciousness research we hear a lot about the need for

01:18:39 ► §

consciousness research we know so little about the human mind a lot of funding

01:18:44 ► §

goes into cognitive psychology

01:18:45 ► §

particularly if it involves computer models because it’s could feed into new generations

01:18:51 ► §

of computer that’s where the why the funding goes into that area um relatively low funding goes into

01:18:58 ► §

psychological research that’s to do with psychotherapy because that’s most of the province

01:19:03 ► §

of practicing psychotherapists who are self-funding or rather who are funded by the people that’s to do with psychotherapy, because that’s most of the province of practising psychotherapists

01:19:05 ► §

who are self-funding, or rather who are funded by the people

01:19:08 ► §

that go to see them.

01:19:11 ► §

A certain amount goes into official psychiatric and drug research

01:19:15 ► §

to do with centrally active drugs.

01:19:18 ► §

But the vast majority of psychedelic research,

01:19:21 ► §

99.999% at least,

01:19:26 ► §

which has a lot to say, as I suppose you would agree,

01:19:30 ► §

about the nature of consciousness, the range of the imagination,

01:19:34 ► §

the powers of the human mind, etc.,

01:19:36 ► §

is not funded at all by official agencies.

01:19:40 ► §

In fact, every effort is made to suppress it.

01:19:43 ► §

In spite of official

01:19:45 ► §

discouragement and suppression where hundreds of millions of dollars are

01:19:49 ► §

spent in trying to stop it happening rather than encourage it it actually goes

01:19:55 ► §

on and there’s a wealth of experience built up about human consciousness which

01:20:01 ► §

is relevant to the larger question of the nature of our minds, their relation to our bodies, the relation of consciousness to the biochemical level,

01:20:10 ► §

things which are perfectly compatible with a lot of mainstream concerns

01:20:14 ► §

and certainly of enormous interest in trying to get a better understanding of the world we live in and of ourselves.

01:20:20 ► §

Here’s an area where, for legal and other reasons,

01:20:24 ► §

virtually the whole of the research effort is in the amateur domain, and virtually the whole of it is negatively funded by the public domain, in the sense that funds are spent trying to stop it.

01:20:44 ► §

There’s the possibility of networks and of coordinated questions being asked,

01:20:48 ► §

which could be of enormous value starting today,

01:20:53 ► §

because there’s not much prospect of this research being taken up officially.

01:20:57 ► §

Yet there’s, I would have thought, the formulation of appropriate questions could lead to very interesting research being undertaken by explorers of the psychedelic realm.

01:21:04 ► §

Yes, I quite agree. I mean, this would be an obvious area where the simple codification

01:21:13 ► §

and making available of data would have a tremendous impact on the models being developed within the field.

01:21:30 ► §

There’s a related area as astrology or the so-called pseudosciences are together.

01:21:38 ► §

These are not going to be funded any other way than by amateur groups, I suppose. if the means existed for sharing the information that already is known to result in various experiments.

01:21:51 ► §

So we do need to get out.

01:21:54 ► §

The new system of pseudosciences with the regular sciences would result.

01:22:01 ► §

For example, if people had the computer program that

01:22:06 ► §

displayed when they woke up each morning

01:22:07 ► §

their natal chart and the positions

01:22:10 ► §

of the current planets, noted

01:22:12 ► §

any

01:22:13 ► §

transits of

01:22:15 ► §

the daily planets over

01:22:18 ► §

the sensitive points on their natal chart

01:22:20 ► §

and tried to correlate that with

01:22:22 ► §

for example

01:22:23 ► §

diseases, psychological states, and

01:22:27 ► §

so on. Then there’s a tremendous amount of information coming to this. Thousands of people

01:22:32 ► §

who do believe in astrology could be available for high school researchers and so on. Testing

01:22:39 ► §

hypotheses posed from some other areas, such as archaeology, paleontology, and big science of planetary

01:22:50 ► §

astronomy, for example, about possible impact of planetesimals and so on. All of this could

01:22:56 ► §

be synthesized easily using computer network technology, according to some wild hypothesis that came in from some clever high school science teacher.

01:23:08 ► §

So the psychedelic research, pseudosciences, other things that are totally rejected by society,

01:23:17 ► §

would have cracks in the structure through which they could reemerge back into the mainstream and making their contribution toward the solution of our global problems.

01:23:28 ► §

Yes, human sexuality would be another area where data is not gathered because of institutional biases

01:23:37 ► §

that are conscious or unconscious, but that networks of amateurs could organize themselves and this is probably largely how it’s done anyway.

01:23:49 ► §

It’s probably one of the least organized areas of social research that exists.

01:23:56 ► §

And yet it’s central to our psychological health and our sense of equilibrium in the world.

01:24:04 ► §

Nutrition is another.

01:24:07 ► §

Yes, there’s a wonderful example of nutrition,

01:24:09 ► §

because lots of people pay attention to what they eat.

01:24:13 ► §

Official nutritional studies are, on the whole, pretty crass.

01:24:17 ► §

I went into this when I was working in India,

01:24:19 ► §

looking at the simple question of protein requirements.

01:24:22 ► §

It turned out that the whole of the global food strategy

01:24:25 ► §

had been based on studies done using American college students as average people,

01:24:31 ► §

you know, the protein requirement,

01:24:32 ► §

based on heavy consumption of hamburgers,

01:24:35 ► §

something like 60 grams of protein a day.

01:24:38 ► §

Well, this, as people widened the database,

01:24:40 ► §

as people looked at what really happened in India to poor people,

01:24:43 ► §

this has been lowered to about 20 grams a day. And yet the whole world food production strategy was distorted

01:24:49 ► §

for two decades by this kind of nutritional study. Real nutritional research that looked

01:24:58 ► §

into specialized areas like allergies and how to deal with them would have large number

01:25:03 ► §

of volunteers bringing forth information.

01:25:05 ► §

Research on people who can survive with incredibly little food

01:25:10 ► §

would have enormous implications for the world food problem

01:25:14 ► §

by showing that it may be possible not only to work on increasing the supply

01:25:19 ► §

but reducing the demand.

01:25:21 ► §

It may be possible, as some people practice doing,

01:25:24 ► §

as part of spiritual disciplines

01:25:26 ► §

or otherwise to survive on incredibly small amounts there’s huge areas in nutritional research

01:25:32 ► §

where there’s a wealth of information that’s totally untapped at the moment the official

01:25:37 ► §

nutritional journals are based on artificial experiments or nutritional surveys where people

01:25:43 ► §

go around with clipboards or sit around observing people eating and weighing them every week.

01:25:50 ► §

We carried some out in India ourselves.

01:25:52 ► §

Of a completely unrealistic kind.

01:25:56 ► §

And yet, nobody thought of going around asking people

01:25:59 ► §

what they thought about nutrition.

01:26:02 ► §

Let me turn the tape.

01:26:02 ► §

What have you thought about nutrition?

01:26:04 ► §

Let me turn the tape.

01:26:11 ► §

Well, we’ll have to catch up with them again next week and see what turns up when they turn the tape over.

01:26:14 ► §

Although what we just heard was both sides of a cassette tape

01:26:19 ► §

from that session that was simply labeled Tape 1.

01:26:23 ► §

And is it just me, or did the fact that they didn’t have an

01:26:26 ► §

audience to entertain make this conversation fall a little flat or have a low energy level

01:26:33 ► §

yet i hope you took away from this talk the fact that the possibility for grassroots science still

01:26:40 ► §

does exist particularly in the psychedelic community where government-sanctioned research is extremely difficult to do, to say the least.

01:26:49 ► §

And when you think about it, there really is no area of science

01:26:53 ► §

that should be more deeply investigated than the vast area of human consciousness.

01:26:59 ► §

And yet, you know, the most promising medicines in this field are all but ignored.

01:27:04 ► §

Now, to give you a little idea of what a grassroots scientist can contribute,

01:27:09 ► §

I remember one week in Palenque many years ago

01:27:13 ► §

when a large group of us tested a new psychoactive chemical for the first time.

01:27:18 ► §

In all, I think there were probably a little over 40 of us who took it,

01:27:23 ► §

and our reactions were all over the place,

01:27:25 ► §

everywhere from euphoria to one near-death experience when it was discovered that this particular substance

01:27:32 ► §

doesn’t mix with a certain prescription medicine.

01:27:37 ► §

As it turned out, there was a budding young scientist among us who had the presence of mind

01:27:42 ► §

to create and hand out a questionnaire about the experience,

01:27:46 ► §

and I think most of us filled it out.

01:27:49 ► §

And the result of this little impromptu survey, all anecdotal evidence, still remains like

01:27:56 ► §

the only study, if you want to call it that, of this particular medicine.

01:28:01 ► §

You know, it isn’t much, but it’s all we have. And I’ll link to the online report of

01:28:06 ► §

this experiment in the program notes for this podcast, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.

01:28:13 ► §

And so grassroots science can make a difference, even if it’s just to alert someone who is

01:28:19 ► §

using prescription medicines to avoid a psychoactive compound that big science hasn’t yet had a chance to take a look at.

01:28:27 ► §

You know, in essence, the three of these amigos seem to be encouraging groups like Arrowhead to come into existence,

01:28:34 ► §

which Arrowhead actually did some four years after this trialogue was held.

01:28:39 ► §

And it seems, after listening to the give and take between Rupert, Ralph, and Terrence just now,

01:28:46 ► §

that maybe a good starting place would be for our community to continue to formulate scientific questions

01:28:53 ► §

that grassroots research can use in an attempt to answer some of the larger questions

01:28:59 ► §

that the big science people just aren’t interested in.

01:29:03 ► §

I don’t know what the answer is myself, but I’m sure that with all of the great minds

01:29:08 ► §

we have here in the psychedelic community, that answers are probably already growing

01:29:13 ► §

in various corners of cyberdelic space and connections being made, information exchanged,

01:29:18 ► §

and the conscious evolution of consciousness is perhaps continuing at an ever-accelerating pace.

01:29:26 ► §

Or at least that is something I hope is going on.

01:29:30 ► §

And from the comments that have been posted on our blog,

01:29:33 ► §

on the Psychedelic Salon forum over on the growreport.com,

01:29:37 ► §

I feel quite sure that the collective evolution of our species consciousness is on schedule and under budget.

01:29:44 ► §

collective evolution of our species consciousness is on schedule and under budget.

01:29:50 ► §

And yes, I’m aware that the psychedelic salon page over on MySpace has been deleted,

01:29:54 ► §

but let’s not get too carried away with ourselves here.

01:30:00 ► §

You know, there were actually a lot of people trying to post some pretty unwanted comments on that page, and maybe one of them got through the approval process and posted one of their hateful messages there.

01:30:07 ► §

It’s quite conceivable if that happened that a bot would be looking for something like that

01:30:11 ► §

and auto-delete the page. At least that’s the way I want to leave it.

01:30:16 ► §

Anyway, as some of the comments have pointed out,

01:30:19 ► §

do we really want to put so much of our personal information into a database

01:30:23 ► §

that’s controlled by Rupert Murdoch.

01:30:26 ► §

I have to admit that if the system couldn’t be tinkered with, it does have some really interesting potential.

01:30:32 ► §

For instance, I did enjoy learning a little bit more about some of our fellow salonners,

01:30:37 ► §

and I was still working my way through all of the great new music our friends had posted.

01:30:42 ► §

So I’m sorry not to be able to do that anymore,

01:30:45 ► §

but all in all, it’s probably best that we opt out of MySpace and other databases.

01:30:51 ► §

So for the time being, I’ll be posting and reading comments and posts

01:30:55 ► §

on our notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog at psychedelicsalon.org

01:31:00 ► §

and over on our forum at thegirlreport.com

01:31:04 ► §

and the other forums there too I also

01:31:07 ► §

participate in now since I control the first site and the Zandor’s control the other one I feel

01:31:13 ► §

confident that we’ll be around both of them for quite a long time now as for our schedule here

01:31:20 ► §

in the salon for the rest of the year I’m going to take a little time off at the end of the year,

01:31:25 ► §

but there will be at least one more podcast before the 26th,

01:31:30 ► §

and I’m still planning on podcasting my second program

01:31:33 ► §

in the MatrixCast.com series as well.

01:31:37 ► §

So for sure, you can count on the MatrixCast.com conversation

01:31:41 ► §

between Ralph Abraham and William Irvin Thompson,

01:31:44 ► §

and the continuation of today’s trialogue, which will be the next program here in the salon. Thank you. 3.0 license. And if you have any questions about that, just click on the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage.

01:32:08 ► §

And if you have any questions, comments, complaints, or suggestions about these podcasts,

01:32:12 ► §

please just add them as comments to the program notes on

01:32:15 ► §

psychedelicsalon.org blog so that our entire community

01:32:19 ► §

can get involved in these discussions. Or you can also post your thoughts

01:32:23 ► §

on the Psychedelic Salon Forum,

01:32:25 ► §

which you’ll find at thegrowreport.com,

01:32:28 ► §

where, as I said, I also spend some of my online surfing time each week.

01:32:33 ► §

And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:32:38 ► §

Be well, my friends. Thank you.